News that Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds is to be turned into a musical has left me swooning – and I know I'm not alone. First published in 1977, McCullough's Australia-set epic is a foundation text of chick lit. It's up there with Judith Krantz's Scruples (1978) as one of the books that shaped a generation's burgeoning awareness of romance and sexuality.

McCullough's story follows the forbidden – but still frequently consummated – love between a Catholic priest and a quiveringly beautiful, tragically neglected, Irish-Australian lassie. I still wonder if my mother was aware of the Pandora's box she was opening by letting me and my sister, then aged 11 and 13, read (and obsessively reread) the novel.

For one thing, there were fabulously dirty passages – lots of them. Moreover (and this I've only realised in retrospect), there is something downright icky about the book's central premise: that Father Ralph and Meggie, in essence, fall in love the first moment they see each other – when she's still a little girl and he comes to greet her family at a dusty outback train station.

This is, as Germaine Greer has argued, the Ur-story of women's romantic fiction – "the seduction of the daughter by the almighty father". Given the scandals that have since erupted about clerical paedophilia, McCullough articulated a darker subtext than perhaps she intended.

Back then, the forbidden and yet inexorable quality of Father Ralph and Meggie's love engaged our imaginations. And oh! the unspeakable excitement when Father Ralph finally took form in the shape of the divinely handsome and impressively buffed Richard Chamberlain in the 1983 mini-series, which defined the term Major Television Event.

The immediate, and damning, comparison facing The Thorn Birds: The Musical is last year's ill-fated Gone With the Wind. Indeed it is hard to imagine how McCullough, composer Gloria Bruni and director Michael Bogdanov are going to tame the novel's sprawling plot and handle its locations.

If they're clever about the marketing, the musical could slot into, and accelerate, the chick-musical phenomenon. The stage versions of 70s and 80s pop-culture favourites (Dirty Dancing, anyone?) continue to attract hordes of women hungry for a bit of romantic nostalgia (and the chance to introduce their daughters to the stories that so marked mummy's adolescence). One canny move on Bogdanov and co's part is to have hired David Emanuel – best known for creating Princess Diana's wedding dress – as the costume designer: surely, the more tragic love stories that can be folded into the TTB:TM package, the better?

As for the signature tagline we're all waiting for? Picture Father Ralph and Meggie in a torrid embrace in the rose garden. Struggling to free himself from her embrace, he cries: "I love you! But I love God more." And then snogs her face off.